Elizabeth Warren and Tracee Ellis Ross on the Road to Activism

Senator Elizabeth Warren, left, and the actress Tracee Ellis Ross having dinner at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington.CreditJustin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

By Philip Galanes

Sept. 17, 2016

Tracee Ellis Ross may be working 14 hours a day in Los Angeles on her hit TV show, “black-ish.” “But when Elizabeth Warren says she’ll have dinner with you,” Ms. Ross said, walking into a suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, “you get on a plane. I have a million questions for her.”

And from the moment Senator Warren entered the lobby, friendly to all but racewalking toward the elevator, she was happy to offer answers: breaking down complex problems into plain-spoken choices, engaging everyone in sight. When a woman on the elevator said, “You look familiar,” Ms. Warren introduced herself, shook her hand and asked how her evening was going.

Of course, Ms. Warren, 67, comes by teaching naturally. A law professor for over 30 years, most recently at Harvard, she specialized in bankruptcy and commercial law. A strong advocate of consumer protection, she conceived and fought for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010.

Two years later, the political novice was elected a United States senator from Massachusetts. Ms. Warren has since emerged as a very popular figure in the Democratic Party and a fierce advocate for the middle class. In June, she endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, and has gone toe-to-toe with Donald J. Trump in a series of fiery Twitter exchanges.

Ms. Ross, 43, has also established herself as a powerful advocate, particularly for self-esteem among black girls in a series of TV specials, “Black Girls Rock,” and through social media. For eight seasons, beginning in 2000, she starred in the sitcom “Girlfriends,” for which she won two NAACP Image Awards.

But her greatest exposure and acclaim have come with her starring role on “black-ish,” about an extended African-American family, whose third season begins on Wednesday. For her performance, Ms. Ross was nominated for an Emmy for lead actress in a comedy. She is the first African-American woman to be nominated in the category in 30 years, and only the fifth in Emmy history. (The Emmys will be televised Sunday.)

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Ms. Warren this summer at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

Over dinner at the Hay-Adams last week, at a table overlooking the White House, a beet salad and risotto for Ms. Warren and a green salad and arctic char for Ms. Ross, the women spoke freely on a range of subjects: the coming election, their family dynamics and a plan for engaging discouraged fellow citizens.

Philip Galanes: You’re both striking rare notes in the culture. Tracee’s show is about a black family facing real-world problems. It’s one of a kind. And the senator is on fire on the campaign trail. But there’s very little of the usual criticism. Why are we so receptive to you now?

Tracee Ellis Ross: It’s hard to answer about myself, but there’s a “we” in the way the senator speaks. She’s right there with us. That’s something “black-ish” does, too. We’re not looking, objectifyingly, at this family. We’re on the inside with them. Maybe that’s why everybody likes you.

Elizabeth Warren: Trust me, they don’t. I was thinking of how your character on “black-ish” gets to an essential truth. She’s this enormously well-put-together woman, right? She’s a doctor; she saves lives. And she’s not taking flak from anyone. Except when one of her children makes her think she’s not a good mother. Vulnerability underlies everything we care about. We put so much effort into being strong and independent, but at heart, we’re all just working to keep it together. And I don’t just mean the working mom thing.

TER: No, it’s a human thing.

EW: That’s the part of my job that scares me the most: that I’ll miss an opportunity to make a change that would have helped. It’s not whether I win or lose. It’s knowing how much people out there are smashed up against the windshield. So, can we find a place to put a little more security in the system, to help folks be less likely to get cheated?

PG: It sounds like a lot of pressure.

EW: No, I wake up most mornings, and in that instant before you open your eyes, I think: What do I get to do today? Who do I get to push?

TER: I’m trying to think of this in terms of race. As a woman of color, we’re raised to know we have to be twice as good. But because of who my mom is [Diana Ross] and the opportunities I’ve been given, I think my struggle has been more: How can I expand the ways in which we’re seen?

PG: One reason you’re both such powerful advocates — for the middle class, for self-esteem — is that you’ve fused who you are with the issues you care about.

EW: Well, I know who I am, and I know what I fight for. Whether we’re talking about making college a little more affordable — or health care or social security — I want to be as sharp as I can be because I know how tough things are. That’s my opportunity now.

PG: It reminds me of your great line: “I was brought up on the ragged edge of the middle class.” What made it “ragged”?

EW: Because it was so hard to hold on to. My mother clung to it — “We are middle class” — because our grasp was so tenuous. There were times we were and times we weren’t.

TER: I feel like I’m on the inside for the first time. Inside the castle. I have an Emmy nomination! And I’ve been in this career a long time. I’m 43, not some ingénue who just stumbled into this. Much of my role has been as an advocate for self-esteem and humanity. The beauty of my work is that I get to unzip something that people are afraid to touch. To make them more comfortable in their own skin.

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Anthony Anderson and Ms. Ross on “black-ish.”CreditKelsey McNeal/ABC

PG: Did that come from personal experience?

TER: I grew up on the ragged edge of self-acceptance, where I was holding on to it, but it was easy to fall off. But as I found my way inside myself, I’ve been able to accept my own hair, my own shape. And now I get to bring that to other people.

PG: It’s funny. When people hear you’re Diana Ross’s daughter, they probably start fantasizing about living in castles with Michael Jackson on speed dial. But when you were born, your mom was probably just 10 years from the ragged edge herself.

TER: They have fantasies about what’s happening in our world right now. But my mother is an international treasure, and royalty in the black community, because she did something that didn’t exist at a time when it didn’t happen. She paved her own road. And being her daughter, people loved me just because I was part of her. But from a very young age, I wanted to fill that space with something that was worthy of being looked at.

EW: I love that. You saw you had opportunity, but rather than just saying “Lucky me,” you said, “What can I do with it that expands opportunity for others?”

TER: That was the deal for me.

PG: Was the tenuousness of your lives as girls, whether material or emotional, what sent you into the world with such gusto? Go get it!

EW: No, no, no. It’s the other way around. It’s fragile. Security is something you can work for, but in our family, it was elusive. So the way I internalized it as a child was to see that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. There were times Daddy had a salary, and we were O.K. And then Daddy had a heart attack, and it all turned upside-down: no money coming in, the bills stacking up, we lose the family car.

TER: How old were you?

EW: I was 12. I remember my mother and my Aunt Bee going to look at rent houses because we were going to lose our home. I’d hear my mother crying at night, and I noticed my parents started sleeping in separate rooms.

PG: I thought only gay kids were so vigilant, reading every little sign. But you did, too.

EW: That’s right.

TER: And so did I. But I didn’t have your childhood or yours, either.

EW: But this is what art does. It’s what you do, Tracee. You help us hear and understand our own human stories. And this ties straight into politics. Go listen to these guys on the floor of the Senate talking about people who are losing their homes, describing them like you’d talk about furniture that should be tossed out. It’s a “they” that’s so far away.

TER: But it’s not just in politics. It’s everywhere. This “otherness” that’s all of a sudden part of our culture. People grabbing on to what’s theirs out of fear it might be taken away.

EW: I think it’s deliberately political. People across America now understand there’s a lot that’s broken. People feel like I did when I was 12 years old: “I’m about to lose the whole thing.” And they feel that way because it’s true. Millions of people were turned upside-down in the financial crash, and they can’t get a foothold. Young people with college debt are starting out 10 yards behind the starting line. And this is the Donald Trump moment. He says, “Blame the immigrants, blame women, blame people who have different religious beliefs than you, blame people who aren’t the same color as you.” Because if everyone turns on each other ——

TER: Then what?

EW: Then the same old system that keeps billionaires on top stays right where it is.

PG: But what does blaming do for the guy who’s about to lose his home? He still doesn’t get to keep it.

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Ms. Warren and Ms. Ross taking a selfie for the senator’s grandchildren.CreditJustin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

EW: It’s a zero-sum game. There’s one piece of bread here. And if you’ve got more, I’ve got less. But there’s no more bread. That was not America. We were building an America that said, “If we educate all our kids, we’ll actually make more.”

TER: There’s enough sun for everyone.

EW: We went from a world that said, “We can increase opportunity for everyone,” not that we were trying to. Go back to the ’30s and ’40s, with gays deeply in the closet, and African-Americans with fewer opportunities than whites and Latinos and women getting shut out of lots of things. But we embraced the idea that we could all pitch in, through government, and expand opportunity. And when the civil rights movement kicks in, we’re expanding to more and more people. We’re not perfect, but we’re on the right road. Then starting in the Reagan years, we see a different description of America: Only invest in those at the top, and let trickle-down economics take care of everyone else.

PG: But we’ve had 30 years of proof that trickle-down economics doesn’t work. Why does the G.O.P. still push it? Why do working-class voters still go for it?

EW: I blame Democrats big time. I don’t think we’ve offered a clear alternative story of how we build a future together. I believe in the competition of ideas. Let’s get out there and explain, at a human level, what it means if America becomes a zero-sum world. It’s not enough to say, “stupid wall, stupid wall.” O.K., we get “stupid wall.” So what’s the plan? And if the answer is, “blah, blah, blah,” then shame on us.

TER: Because there has to be a real answer.

EW: It’s not enough to say, “Hey, look, I have a 17-point plan that’s going to fix everything.” It’s also got to say, “I get that it’s broken out there, and I will bust my tail every day to try to fix it.”

TER: I’m baffled by the people who say, “I’m just not going to vote.”

EW: Please don’t say that while I have food in my mouth.

TER: But there are way too many people who aren’t connected. They’re so connected to Instagram or ——

EW: Oh, wait! Where’s my phone? I Snapchat with my granddaughters. Can I take a picture with you? They’ll love it. And I’ll forget unless we do it while I’m thinking of it.

[They take a selfie on the senator’s phone.]

PG: Your stock is going through the roof, Granny Warren!

EW: It’s why it’s so much fun to do this with someone whose show reaches millions of people across this country.

TER: The fact that you even knew my name kind of blew me away.

EW: Now is a moment for change in this country, and when I watch a show like “black-ish,” I’m even more optimistic. It tells me we’re pushing the conversation in a warm and human direction that really is about expanding our view of who we can be and who are friends are.

PG: Senator, you’ve endorsed Hillary Clinton. But there’s a lot of resistance to her, especially among young voters. What do you make of that?

EW: It’s not about a single person. We are not going to make change by finding one person with the magic insight.

TER: Change comes by galvanizing lots of connections.

EW: When many, many of us say, “We’re not going to do it like that anymore.” I’m from Massachusetts. Ten years ago in Massachusetts, there was no marriage-equality law. Then the Supreme Court of Massachusetts said: Equal marriage. You can marry whoever you love. And all around the country — whoa! — state legislatures said, “We’re going to shut that down.” But 10 years later, we live in a country where people can marry who they love in every state. Have we won every battle? No, but we made change against great resistance. It wasn’t because it was gravity’s time. It happened because we found something essential in our humanity. When our brothers and sisters came out of the closet, we weren’t talking about “they.” We were talking about “us.” These are our hearts; this is our love.

TER: It’s like the episode we did on police brutality. There’s a lot going on in this country, right now, around the lives of black people. And I’m grateful to work on a show that could bring such an important human story to the audience as part of that “us.”

EW: And the writers and producers and the whole ensemble that makes it happen, they told a story that touched people’s hearts. That’s how we make change. By speaking straight to people about issues that matter.

PG: And sometimes very mean, especially about Donald Trump. You’ve called him a “thin-skinned bully” and said he’s freaked out because he’s losing to a girl.

EW: But it’s never gratuitously mean. It’s just deserts. I’m on fire when it’s time to be on fire. We can’t change this world with, “It will all work out in the end.”

TER: Do you ever struggle with it, personally, when it’s time to be mean?

EW: No, I wake up sometimes, in the night, and think, I should also have said. …”

TER: That’s hilarious! Have you always been that way?

EW: Let me put it this way: What I thought I could do has changed over time. When I was 12 and we needed money, I started sewing. I put an ad in the papers. I babysat. I raised dogs and sold puppies. I’ve always been willing to do what needs to be done.

TER: You’re like my mom. She was always, “What’s your plan?”

EW: I’m with your mom.

PG: Let’s end with something Tracee mentioned earlier. How do we energize demoralized voters in either party? The ones who say: “It’s all too broken. I give up.”

EW: Discouragement is the most powerful voter suppression tool in America today.

TER: A friend told me, “I’m just not voting.” I thought, “We need to have a conversation, maybe several.” But these are divisive times, and maybe it’s too much to ——

EW: You don’t have to do so much.

TER: No?

EW: Nobody is confused about the differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Trump is building a future for a small set of America, and Clinton is working hard for everyone. Is she perfect? Of course not. But you’ve got enough information to make the choice.

TER: So no giving up.

EW: No. And once you land there, make a little investment. Knock on a few doors.

TER: Make sure your siblings are registered.

EW: And my favorite: Always talk to the guy behind you in line at the grocery store.